The Discovery Of Slowness (20 page)

‘And do you know what's best of all?' exclaimed Gilbert. ‘We'll arrive at the Sandwich Islands six weeks from now. The reporters are already waiting.'

‘And the girls,' Kirby added. God knows, he always talked about girls. No charitable storm blew that word out of his mouth.

The storm broke suddenly, as though it had been lying in wait in the wings. A calm, silvery sky kept on smiling above racing thunderclouds. Consequently, the violent squall appeared as a particularly vicious attack.

Excitement. Change course: ‘Hard on the wind. Away from the ice.' Will we make it? Hasty prayers. Several voices screamed suddenly, ‘Man overboard!' Gilfillan, the doctor, had been swept into the sea by a single gust. But now what? Two basic rules checkmated each other: never drift towards the shore in a storm, and keep your eye on the man when a man's overboard. John decided that here he could judge only blindly. He had given such cases some thought. He kept his eye on the man. Lower boat into water to leeward! Heave to! A dreadful loss of time and distance from shore. One man pointed towards the ice shore; the
Dorothea
already lay helplessly by the wall, rolling and thumping among blocks of ice. She couldn't get away. She would be ground to pieces. In just a few hours she would be nothing but wooden parts which would be whittled away. Amen. In the face of this storm, she couldn't escape.

Gilfillan's body was saved, but was he still alive? Hanging on the line, Spink had thrown himself on top of him and had brought him in, still laughing. Each person got his strength from
something. Spink had to laugh even while risking his life. Gilfillan breathed again. Done. What next?

Get over to the
Dorothea
by boat? Sheer suicide. No, let's get out of here while the going's good, they screamed. But John Franklin knew his own principles. ‘Never be ashamed like Captain Palmer.' That was fifteen years ago. And the
Bridgewater
had soon disappeared without a trace, not a single survivor. The sea's justice is terrible, and it had to be taken into account.

Questions came – more and more urgently. Franklin thought about them and gave no reply. The swift, raging seas were not simply heavy; they contained ice fragments as big as launches which pushed the ship beam on the waves. Soon it was clear: it would be a miracle if the
Trent
got across. And John didn't believe in miracles; that was something for children.

The critical moment had arrived; even Beechey became nervous: with their slow captain the ship would be wrecked. But why did Franklin stay so calm? What did he actually believe? Why did he stare at the shore; what did he look for with his telescope?

‘There!' John shouted. ‘We've got to get there, Mr Beechey!'

What did he mean? Into the pack-ice? Voluntarily?

‘Precisely that.' John grabbed Beechey by the shoulders and held him. ‘Logic!' he roared against the storm. ‘Logic! In pack-ice we're safe. The only solution.'

And an inlet actually opened up, a fiord barely wider than the ship. The captain had seen it; he still had that much calm in him. But now they had to get in. It just couldn't be done. Two ship-lengths before the inlet, a huge ice-block smashed the rudder, and just as they reached their goal a heavy breaker turned the
Trent
beam-on to the seas. At once the starboard side of the ship crashed into the massive pack-ice. All the men tumbled down: no one could hold on to anything. It was as if someone had pulled a rug out from under them. In addition, a terrible sound, the signal for the dead: the ship's bell started to ring. John clawed his way upright again and pointed up the foremast, shouting, ‘Shake out the reefs!'

They all looked at him as if they were seeing the first signs of
insanity. The next heavy wave came thundering towards them and again smashed the ship into the wall like an egg into a frying-pan. The masts bent like plant stalks. And someone was supposed to go aloft and – what did he say? – ‘Shake out the reefs'? The ship's bell rang like crazy. Of course it did. Everything was finished. It wouldn't stop till they were all dead. The men clutched at whatever was handy; no one stirred any more. The next big wave, the same. The ship was lost.

John Franklin seemed stranger and stranger. Now he grabbed his left shoulder with his right hand, held it tight and pulled it with all his might. Did he want to demote himself in rank, or even tear himself in two? At any rate, he had gone mad; here was the proof. Gilbert cursed, Kirby prayed; they all prayed. Would Kirby ever speak of girls again?

Franklin had torn the sleeve out of his uniform jacket, crawled up to the ship's bell, and between two strikes of the storm warning said to the first officer, ‘Mr Beechey, please be so good as to have the reefs taken out of the foresail.' Then he wound the uniform cloth round the bell's clapper, tied a knot, and pulled it so tight that it might have choked an elephant. ‘Now we have some quiet,' he said contentedly, as though he had gagged the storm, too.

And all at once they felt again something like safety. The bravest among them dared to go aloft to the top of the foremast and shake out the reefs. They saw from above what John already knew: the bow of the
Trent
had struck a short way into the inlet; with full sail on the foremast, without the reefs, they might succeed in sneaking the ship all the way in, if they could make her swerve away from the ice wall between two breakers. Others removed sails still remaining on the mainmast; no one lost hold, and as the sea retreated before making another terrible run, the
Trent
turned obediently, even without her rudder, and slipped away from the storm. The wind drove her into the ice mountains, still threw several bits of debris into her splintering stern, and tore the sails into rags. With a loud crunch the bow wedged itself between the glasslike walls and went on crunching. Finally the ship lay still. One could hardly sense
the motion of the sea, not a breath of wind. Where had the wind gone?

Now previously prepared fenders were brought out, thick stuffed walrus skins to protect the ship from further friction and jolts.

The cook, a man with a wooden leg, limped out of the galley and appeared on deck, quite pale. ‘Have we landed? Do we get off here?

How could they help the
Dorothea?
First of all, they had to get over the glass walls. The first man leapt across from the topgallant yard to the ice: Spink, of course, laughing loudly. He tossed a lanyard to the ice wall; now people, equipment, loose rigging, and above all the whole anchor cable of the
Trent
could be heaved over. John Franklin had a plan again; there was no doubt of that. No one thought to ask any questions. Only Beechey, who had to stay on the ship, said briefly, ‘Good luck, sir. I bet you'll get them all out of that wreck.' ‘Oh, no,' answered John, ‘we'll get the ship to safety. There's an inlet like ours just a hundred paces ahead of her bow.'

Back had listened in. ‘How do you know?'

‘“Sir”, I'm addressed as “sir”,' answered John, with pointed slowness. ‘I've seen the inlet.'

For half an hour they fought their way across the crevasses opening in the ice plateau until they reached the cliff above the
Dorothea
. Deep down she still hurled herself against the ice-wall long since surrounded by the debris of her own masks and spars and one of her boats. How many might already have succumbed?

In a great hurry they lowered the end of the anchor cable down to the
Dorothea
and a short time later hacked an abutment into the ice round the majestic summit on the other side of the fiord. Thank God Buchan grasped the situation at once! The anchor cables were spliced together, wound round the foot of the foremast, and pulled through the grooves they had carved into the abutment at the other end. The storm let up slightly, but the swells were as dreadful as ever.

Twenty-five men stood in the holes they had chopped in the ice and hauled on the rope with all their might. The ship hardly moved from the spot. Or at best, by inches. John divided them into two shifts and took his watch from his pocket. Each group laboured for ten minutes; then it was the other's turn. Any man who let go of the rope dropped to the ground as if unconscious; some of them vomited. Presumably the ship became heavier and heavier as the water poured in. John took all necessary steps to get the survivors out of the wreck, and the exhausted crew thought they might as well start now.

‘Two hours by now,' Kirby panted, his face pale. ‘We've got to give up.'

‘He has no sense of time,' Reid panted back. If he had had enough breath, he would have said more. An hour later he could barely form even this first sentence in his mind. Talking was impossible for them all. During this time, John pulled on the rope, too, although this was usually not acceptable for an officer. But his bare arm was freezing.

All at once the ship gave way and came along. Length by length, she crept forward beneath the cliff. Now Buchan had the foresails cleared and unfurled as the
Dorothea
lay before the gap. Laboriously, the half-wrecked ship slouched into the inlet, more like a saturated sponge than one of His Majesty's ships.

Saved! A single boat lost, but two ships saved and all the men well.

Back went over to John Franklin and said, ‘Sir, I apologise. We owe you our lives.'

John looked at him, and after all the exertion he couldn't get the captain's wrinkles out of his face quickly enough. Why had Back apologised? For Tom Barker, he thought. Odd idea.

As captain, he didn't always have to ask when he didn't understand a sentence. He could pick what he had to know, and Back's motives weren't part of it. Back became insecure and wanted to turn away. But in place of a reply John simply put his arm round Back's shoulders and embraced him.

Meanwhile, Beechey had secured the
Trent
with only five men and had caulked the first leaks. John embraced him, too.

The sailmaker tried to untie the sleeve of John's jacket from the ship's bell to sew it on again. But he had surely imagined that untying the sleeve would be an easier task. It took him almost quarter of an hour. What changes a storm could bring! Suddenly Reid no longer spoke to Back or, when he did, his remarks were cool and ironic. Sometimes he withdrew, and when he returned he looked as if he had been crying. Spink seemed to understand him. He told the young man a story – to him quite alone. It had to do with the adventures of the Patagonians, those giant people down at the southern end of South America who could grab several steers at once by their horns and for whom the rule of love was equality. There were no preferences among them; love there was as universal as air is for breathing. But just that seemed to be the point that made Reid sad. With that he really got tears in his eyes. He had been saved, as well as his ship and his companions – and he wept because he had convinced himself that a certain person loved someone else.

‘Perhaps somebody will understand these midshipmen,' said Beechey.

‘Give him a lot of work to do,' answered Franklin. ‘He must not cry but learn his profession.'

On taking their bearings they discovered that they had passed latitude 82 degrees. John got out Dr Orme's treatise on Pupil F. Now he was not a pupil any more. He could read it.

He even felt suspense. ‘The creation of the individual through speed' – he had always feared that the essay would tell him how things would go on in the future. Now he even hoped so, for it couldn't be anything bad any more.

Dr Orme used difficult phrases like ‘differences among people insofar as, measured by individual appearances, they are distinguished by the completeness of their vision'. These differences Dr Orme found not in the mechanical properties of eye or ear, as one might think, but in the orientation of the brain: ‘Pupil F is slow because he has to look at everything that comes into view for a very long time. The image held by the eye remains in place to be thoroughly explored; succeeding images glide past
unexamined. Pupil F sacrifices completeness for detail. For the latter the entire head is required, and it takes some time before there is room for the next unit. Therefore, a slow person cannot follow fast developments––'

But I have blindness and the fixed look, thought John; why didn't he mention those?

‘––but he can grasp unique appearances and slow developments better.'

After that, Dr Orme wrote about the ‘ominous acceleration of the present time': he proposed measuring everyone's speed with instruments and deciding on that basis what each person was suited to do. There should be ‘synoptic' and ‘individuated' professions. Many senseless exertions and sufferings would be unnecessary if their speed were measured early on. In schools, separate sections could be organised for quick and slow children.

‘One should let the quick live quickly and the slow slowly, each by his distinct temporal measure. The quick can be put into synoptic professions, which are exposed to the accelerations of the age: they will be able to bear up well and perform their best service as coachmen or members of Parliament. Slow people, on the other hand, should learn professions requiring detailed application, such as craftsmanship, the medical arts, or painting. From their detached position they can follow gradual change and judge carefully the labour of the quick and of the governing.'

Flora Reed would have become quiet with rage, John thought. Of equality, not a trace. But he had that thought too soon, for only a few lines farther on Dr Orme moved to the matter of universal suffrage. Every four years, the population of England, perhaps even only the slow – also the women! – should select the best among the quick who had proven themselves as a new government. ‘The slow,' argued Dr Orme, ‘know how to judge aptly after four years what has changed and how they have been treated.'

John reflected for a very long time, then pushed the treatise aside. ‘No,' he said proudly and sadly at the same time, ‘he's made something up.'